Core Concepts

The following are core concepts required to understand how Lumberjack works.

Combining

Combining Messages is how Lumberjack cuts down on the number of Messages output from your program. It does so by giving the currently held Messages at the current node, two at a time, to the Combiner classes that are currently registered to Lumberjack when a Push happens.

Lumberjack only provides one Combiner, the TextEqualityCombiner. You can write your own Combiners and register them with Lumberjack. The idea is that each Combiner would have its own criteria for whether a Message should be combined and how to combine that specific Message with another of the same type.

Combiner’s have two main functions, shouldMessagesBeCombined and combine.

The function shouldMessagesBeCombined, returns True if the pair of messages satisfy the associated criteria. For example in the TextEqualityCombiner, if the Text strings are exactly equal, it signals they should be combined.

The function combine, takes two Messages and combines them in the way that is specific to that Combiner class. For example in the TextEqualityCombiner, the only thing that happens is the second Message’s ranks gets added to the first and the message count is increased. This is because the text strings were equal. This may not be the case for all Combiners that you write yourself.

Communication

Communicating Messages between nodes in an intelligent way is how Lumberjack scales logging Messages. The Communicator class instance handles the specifics on how the communication is implemented. For example, it handles where a specific node passes its Messages and which nodes are allowed to output messages. As of now, there are two implemented Communicators: BinaryTreeCommunicator and RootCommunicator.

BinaryTreeCommunicator, as the name implies, utilizes a standard Binary Tree algorithm to define how the nodes are connected. Children pass their Messages to their parent and the root node is the only node allowed to output Messages.

RootCommunicator has a very simple communication scheme that does not scale well but is useful in some cases for its simplicity. All nodes connect directly to the root node which is also the only node allowed to output Messages.

Pushing

A push has three steps: combining, sending, and receiving Messages. When you queue a Message into Lumberjack, it is held at the node that generated the Message until you indicate the Lumberjack to push, either once or fully. If you do not push, then only the Messages generated at the root node will be outputed.

In a single push, nodes send their currently held Messages to the nodes their are connected to based on the Communicator’s communcation scheme. For example in the BinaryTreeCommunicator, children nodes send their Messages to their parent. While the root node only receives Messages. After a single push, it is not guaranteed that all Messages will be ready to be outputted.

A full push is a number of single pushes until all currently held Messages. The Communicator tells the Lumberjack class how many single pushes it takes to fully flush the system of Messages. For example in the BinaryTreeCommunicator, it is the log of the number of nodes.